The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living
What artworks of the past 25 years will we care about in the future?
Damien Hirst‘s 1991 tiger shark suspended in a tank of formaldehyde, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, should be among them.
Why is this work so important? In the past when I have lectured on Hirst, I’ve focused on the following:
- Its revision of minimalism, i.e. how it takes the very closed and complete containers of someone like Donald Judd and fills them, in this case with an animal, recalling the “meat pieces” of Paul Thek.
- Its challenge to Marcel Duchamp and Robert Rauschenberg, i.e. if art can be anything and include animals, why can’t art be a very large animal preserved in formaldehyde with little else indicating it as art?
- The tremendous amount of controversy it generated when it was initially shown in the first “Young British Artists” show at the Saatchi Gallery in 1992. In the UK, it’s been called one of the top three art controversies ever, paralleling those surrounding the exhibition of Carl Andre’s work in the 1970s and James Abbot McNeill Whistler one hundred years earlier.
- Its relation to Hirst’s previous and subsequent work as well as the subsequent history and influence of the YBAs.
- The commanding scale of the work, which paralleled the size of Abstract Expressionist paintings, the increasing scale of photography and reflected a return of sculpture.
- The theme of death, a reading catalyzed by the title. Meaning in this work (if understood through the title) thus sways between affirmation and hopelessness regarding death. In other words, it entertains both the fact that staring at a dead animal allows you to understand death better as well as reinforces our inability to conceptualize death. More broadly, the title also makes us think about so many other historical works (whether they depict Jesus or Marat or John F. Kennedy) that have tried to put the idea of death into our minds. Like Hirst’s shark, do these works allow us to better understand the experience of death or do they further distance us from the reality?
Again, the aforementioned is what I have (more or less) focused on in the past. Yet when I returned to my notes the other day, I realized I had downplayed a major issue: fear.
Hirst’s shark also scares people. This could be the most important part of the work.
Maybe I’d always glossed over this aspect — or dealt with it indirectly through a discussion of the controversy surrounding the piece — because I thought shock value was too easy, too commonly-associated with the YBAs and not actually relevant when you spent the time getting to know the work.
Or maybe I was trying to be objective in the face of my own fear of sharks. I saw Jaws at a young age and have not been entirely enthused about swimming in deep water ever since.
Whatever the reasoning, in remembering this work and thinking about my experiences of it (in person, in reproduction and in the various other ways in which we engage with artworks in our heads), I realized I also thought about the fear this work prompts in me, and it seemed important to try and inject this feeling back into the interpretation of the work.
So here are some further thoughts on the shark, particularly how this work focuses on fear:
Source: The Huffington Post
